Join our call to hear about the movement for change in St. Louis. St. Louis is one of only a few remaining major cities that conduct partisan municipal elections. Candidates regularly come into office with a minority of the vote. The STL Approves Campaign is hoping to change that. STL Approves' "Proposition D for Democracy" has recently been certified for the 2020 November ballot This comes after organizers collected 20,000 signatures, twice as many as were needed to qualify. 72% of voters now support the measure. Prop D would accomplish two important goals for voters:

End partisan primaries and replace them with an open, top-two nonpartisan primary in which all voters vote and all candidates compete.

Institute approval voting, an innovative form of voting where citizens "approve" of as many candidates as they want.

Please join us to hear about how this important campaign is hoping to dismantle barriers and build a better future for St. Louis. We'll be joined by Campaign Chair Benjamin Singer, local civil rights leader and supporter Reverend Darryl Gray, and campaign partner and national expert on approval voting Aaron Hamlin, the Executive Director of the Center for Election Science.

St. Louisans will vote this year on a new method for electing city officials.

Advocates of approval voting, which allows people to vote for as many candidates as they find acceptable, announced Wednesday they had more than 20,000 signatures to place their Proposition D for Democracy on the ballot. That is more than twice the number they needed.

The coming vote in one of the nation's more prominent cities presents a breakthrough opportunity for this alternative election method. Those who say American democracy isn't benefiting from the traditional system — voters select one candidate, and the one with the most votes wins — have rallied behind ranked-choice voting much more often.

<p>That somewhat more complex system (with instant runoffs eliminating candidates not listed first on enough ballots until one person has majority support) has now been embraced by New York and a score of other municipalities as well as all of Maine.</p>
<p>Under the St Louis initiative, the nonpartisan primaries for mayor, city comptroller and aldermen would be conducted using a form of approval voting. The two people endorsed on the most number of ballots would move on to the general election, which would be conducted using the traditional choose-one method.</p>
<p>Fargo, at 125,000 the biggest city in North Dakota, is the only place with approval voting so far. St. Louis is approaching three times as big.</p>
<p>STL Approves is the democracy reform organization pushing the idea. It is supported by the <a href="http://thefulcrum.us/center-for-election-science" target="_self">Center for Election Science</a>, the main national advocacy group for approval voting.</p><p>Advantages of switching to the new system, advocates say, would be an end to the election of people with only plurality support and a greater chance for grassroots candidates with new ideas to get elected.</p>
<p>Proponents of the change point out that in the last five years St. Louis has had eight elections in which the winner received less than 37 percent of the vote.</p>
<p>The measure will likely go before the voters sometime this year but the exact date will be determined by city officials, who like all officials nationwide are having to work around the coronavirus pandemic in scheduling elections.</p>

Given the chance, two-thirds of voters in the Democratic presidential primaries would support more than one candidate, according to a new poll.

The nationwide survey was conducted last week for the Center for Election Science, which supports approval voting, a system that allows people to choose as many candidates in each contest that they find acceptable.

Proponents say the system provides the most accurate picture of the support for each candidate and is superior to ranked-choice voting, the alternative system that has received the most attention recently.

<p>The polling was done before the contest was remade and substantially narrowed this week as three major candidates dropped out, Amy Klobuchar on Monday following Pete Buttegeig on Sunday and Tom Steyer on Saturday.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, approval voting advocates say their method's best virtue is its simplicity in identifying the candidate with the broadest base of support — and the poll they commissioned sets out to underscore that.</p>
<p>The biggest takeaway is a contradiction of the narrative that the Democratic electorate is fractured.</p><p>Using the one-voter, one-candidate method, the poll of 821 likely primary voters found Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont had 40 percent of the vote, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts 20 percent and former Vice President Joe Biden 14 percent.</p>
<p>Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., appeared next at 9 percent, followed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg at 8 percent, Minnesota's Sen. Klobuchar at 3 percent, businessman Steyer at 2 percent and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii at 1 percent.</p>
<p>But a different picture of the race emerges when those polled were invited to list all the candidates of whom they approved. In that case the results were:</p><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Sanders: 60 percent</li><li>Warren: 55 percent</li><li>Buttigieg: 39 percent</li><li>Biden: 36 percent</li><li>Klobucher: 28 percent</li><li>Steyer: 13 percent</li><li>Gabbard: 7 percent.</li></ul>
<p>The biggest growth in support was seen by Buttigieg, followed by Warren and Klobuchar.</p>
<p>Under RCV, also known as the instant runoff method, voters list candidates in order of preference. If one wins a majority of the vote outright, that person is the winner. Otherwise, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the second choice of their supporters are distributed among the remaining candidates. This process continues until a candidate earns a majority.</p>
<p>In this case, those polled could choose and rank as many candidates as they wanted to. </p>
<p>The results using this version of RCV (but including the highest support for some of the earlier rounds) were:</p><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Sanders: 54 percent</li><li>Warren: 46 percent</li><li>Biden: 25 percent</li><li>Buttigieg: 13 percent</li><li>Bloomberg: 9 percent</li><li>Klobuchar: 5 percent</li><li>Steyer: 2 percent</li><li>Gabbard: 2 percent</li></ul>
<p>The poll also took the same approach in asking people about what issues they consider to be most important. When asked to choose just one, health care was on top with 41 percent.</p>
<p>It still finished the highest when people were given the chance to choose (i.e., "approve" of) multiple issues, but the largest area of growth occurred around the issues of education (which surged from 4 percent as the top issue to 79 percent as one of many important issues) and income equality (boosted from 10 percent to 74 percent).</p>
<p>Two years ago Fargo, N.D., became the first city to adopt approval voting and proponents are hoping to add St. Louis to their fold this year. Maine was the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting in 2016 and it has spread to about two dozen cities.</p>
<p>The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.</p>